1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the invention described herein pertain to the field of computer systems. More particularly, but not by way of limitation, one or more embodiments of the invention enable methods for enforcing group oriented workflow requirements for multi-layered documents.
2. Description of the Related Art
Current internationalization products and packages generally provide language, country and region divisions for localizing data. For example, certain programming languages allow for these types of documents or classes to override one another based on a localization setting in order to target a program at a given locale. Other attempts at providing a document to multiple locales use XML. This provides for extremely complex documents that do not take advantage of locales that are closely related. This causes large amounts of duplicate data to be allocated for a particular document. Maintenance becomes chaotic at best when one data value in one locale is changed without changing the corresponding data value in all other locales. Both of the previously described methodologies are generally used for single documents that are not very complex. In short, the current internationalization products are limited in scalability in the end documents that are produced using these methodologies.
There are no known systems that divide data based on an audience wherein an audience allows for arbitrary divisions of documents based on user defined entities. Current systems for generating internationalized documents also fail to take into account the complexities that cause documents to vary on a publication-by-publication basis. For example, the regional, regulatory, and cultural requirements of the audience are generally beyond the scope of current generation internationalization solutions. When publishing documents for a global audience, data that is an appropriate substitute in one instance of the document may not be an adequate substitute in a different instance. French regulations, for instance, prohibit imagery that shows a hypodermic needle whereas in other countries such images are permissible. The same concept is also applicable to language, cultural, and regional requirements associated with a particular document. Current systems provide mechanisms for publishing documents in multiple languages, but require brute force entry of multi-lingual data in a way that tends require large amounts of duplicate operator entries for similar languages, cultural, regional or regulatory specific embodiments of a document. For example, current systems require a complete set of entries for two languages that may only differ in a small way such as United Kingdom and United States English. Current systems do not allow for inheritance of values based on arbitrary divisions in unlimited dimensions and generally only apply to country, language and region for example.
Current systems fail to scale with the amount of data that comprises large documents targeted at a large number of locales. However, in addition, there are no known internationalization document generation and maintenance systems that tightly integrate with workflow engines. Current systems used for the generation and maintenance of documents targeted at multiple localizations may indirectly integrate with workflow engines at best. For example, when a worker is done with a given operation on a document, the worker may pass the status of the document to the workflow engine. The workflow engine then routes the document to other workers based on a completion of the previous worker's task. Workflow engines configured to handle the workflow related to documents send existing documents to various workers instead of routing documents that are in the process of being created as part of the workflow. Since heretofore documents have been single layered, there has been no possibility for a workflow engine to driven by actions occurring on the layers of a multi-layer document targeted at multiple localizations. Current workflow systems do not provide flexible solutions for document generation with regards to designating tasks to be executed in sequential, concurrent or round robin order and do not allow for a document to be broken down category or by family in order to divide and conquer the work effort. There are no known diagramming tools integrated with current workflow engines that comprise category or family (for example, category and manufacturer divisions of a product database) or other publication specific aides such as layout or publication aware modules. Existing systems are not tightly coupled with a backend data set that relates to the publication of a document such as a catalog and do not provide mechanisms for ensuring only properly formed data gets into the document.
There are no known products that assign publication tasks related to a multi-layered document to groups or roles based on publication workflow rules. For example, there are no known products that integrate with rules comprising multi-layered searching for values at a certain inheritance level or testing for fields having or not having a value at a certain inheritance level within a multi-layered document. In addition, there are no known products that integrate with validations or conditional branching validations that utilized multi-layered document comprising inherited data. There are no known products that comprise the ability to assign status to a family or protect a document specific layer or node in order to aide in document creation and maintenance. For example, there are no known products that allow a hierarchical family built on a plurality of main database table fields to have a status set indicating that layout pivoting or qualified records entry is complete.
For at least the limitations described above there is a need for a method for enforcing group oriented workflow requirements for multi-layered documents